Foe of Public Broadcasting Aid Backs Auction Financing Plan

By KAREN DE WITT

Published: September 15, 1995

WASHINGTON, Sept. 14—
Senator Larry Pressler, a fervent critic of spending public money for noncommercial broadcasting, endorsed a plan today that would replace Government contributions with a trust fund financed by auctioning off use of the airwaves to commercial broadcasters.

Mr. Pressler, the South Dakota Republican who heads the Senate Commerce Committee, which controls Federal financing for public broadcasting, vowed earlier this year to end Federal support for it.

He expressed support of the auction idea, which was proposed by a group of public broadcasters and would gradually end Federal financing, which this year is $285 million. "This would lead us to a period where we wouldn't have annual appropriations," he said.

The plan would create a $4 billion corporation to take over partial taxpayer financing of the Public Broadcasting Service, National Public Radio and other public broadcasting. The corporation would be mainly financed with a $4 billion share of the proceeds from Federal auction of airwaves for high definition television broadcasting. John Reidy, a Smith Barney analyst, said auctioning the channels could raise $33 billion to $44 billion.

Not surprisingly, commercial broadcasters, who historically have not had to pay for use of the airwaves, balked at the plan, saying it was unfair to make them pay.

Richard Cotton, executive vice president of NBC television, said the commercial broadcasters' disgruntlement had less to do with the financing of public broadcasting than a reversal of a decadelong Federal telecommunication policy.

"He is tearing up 10 years of planning of the orderly evolution of over-the-air broadcasting, from analog to digital," he said. "Broadcasters must be able to transmit the old analog signal and the new digital during the period of time that the marketplace moves from one to the other. Forty percent of the country receives television over the air and not through a wire. Not allowing broadcasters to have the channel for a temporary period would mean that it is impossible for broadcasters to continue to serve existing television sets."

But new digital compression technology has made such airwaves even more valuable than originally envisioned, since it takes fewer megahertz to transmit television signals, leaving an excess of broadcast frequencies available, at no cost, for other new telecommunications uses. The extra signals could be used to carry Internet computer files, two-way paging systems, electronic mail and other services.

Today's plan is a refinement of a proposal advanced in May by the National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service, Public Radio International and America's Public Television Stations, a nonprofit lobbying organization that supports public broadcasting.